The Plural Word hire in Alorese: Contact-Induced Change from Neighboring Alor-Pantar Languages

Abstract

This article discusses the plural word hire in Alorese, an Austronesian language spoken on the islands of Alor and Pantar, in eastern Indonesia. Following the methodological requisites for contact-induced change, I claim that the plural word hire emerged through contact with Papuan Alor-Pantar languages, because (i) Alorese was and still is spoken in close contact with Alor-Pantar languages; (ii) Alorese and the neighboring Alor-Pantar languages share the presence of a plural word, and their plural words have similar syntactic and semantic properties; (iii) Alor-Pantar languages had plural words before they came into contact with Alorese; and (iv) Alorese did not have the plural word hire before it came into contact with Alor-Pantar languages. The innovation of hire is a case of contact-induced grammaticalization, whereby the form is inherited and developed from an original third person plural pronoun going back to Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *si-ida, while the function of the plural word is borrowed from the neighboring Alor-Pantar languages.

From Lamaholot to Alorese

“…The legend about the founding of Pandai is also the first of two legends reported in Lemoine (1969) and cited in Barnes (1973Barnes ( : 86, 2001 and Rodemeier (2006). Today, it is still part of the oral history of the Alorese: in 2016, Francesca Moro recorded a story in Pandai in which the current king of Pandai, Rajab Suleiman Abu Bakar, tells the same legend about a Javanese king who came to Pantar and founded the village of Pandai, dating his arrival at 1,310 AD (Moro 2018). The legend recounts that two Javanese brothers, Aki Ai and his younger brother Mojopahit, sailed to Pantar, where Aki Ai treacherously abandoned Mojopahit.…”

“…10 However, if its segment inventory 9. Moro (2018) revealed that the plural word hire in Alorese emerged through contact with non-Austronesian languages, constituting a complexification of Alorese grammar with bilingual children as agents (2018: 194).…”

“…Note that these studies typically discuss language change in relatively large speaker groups in industrial, literate societies, which is not the situation we attest for Alorese. However, recent research by Moro (2018Moro ( , 2019 on second language (L2) speakers of Alorese shows that similar factors play a role in the simplification of languages spoken in small, pre-industrial societies such as Alorese. Her work indicates that the very last vestige of Alorese morphology -the subject agreement on a small number of frequent verbs -is currently also eroding.…”

Practicalities of language data collection and management in and around Indonesia

“…This is the case with Alorese, an Austronesian language spoken on the islands of Alor and Pantar, which has been in contact with neighbouring Papuan languages for about 600 years (Klamer 2011). There is evidence that Alorese was learned as an L2 by many Papuan speakers (Klamer 2012(Klamer , 2020Moro 2018Moro and Fricke 2020). Studying the on-going changes in the L2 of speakers today allows us to make inferences about the changes which have happened in the past and helps us reconstruct the history of Alorese and the reasons it has the structures is has today (an impoverished morphology, genealogically unexpected grammatical patterns, et cetera).…”

Nouns and pronouns in Central Lembata Lamaholot (Austronesian, Indonesia)

“…For plural marking on nouns using other means, a few scattered cases are attested within the Flores-Lembata group. Alorese has a plural word which has emerged as a consequence of contact-induced grammaticalization involving the neighbouring TimorAlor-Pantar languages (Moro 2017). Hewa, a Sika variety, has a plural word ahan only used for human referents (Fricke 2014: 14).…”